Strange Days

I was cruisin down 94 yesterday. It was a gorgeous March day. Lizardbreath and I had Marvin Gaye Trouble Man and my super soul collection on the stereo and I had that feeling I get about Detroit SO STRONG, the hairs on my neck kept rising and falling, rising and falling.

Detroit is some kind of symbol and pain in my heart. Ever since I was a kid every time I would ride down that stretch of 94 I would get the same feeling in various intensities depending on how open or closed I was at the time.

I remember back in the day, driving down there in an old dark blue and orange Thunderbird with Seychelle. We’d be listening to WJZZ and as I started seeing those backsides of the burnt, huddled houses mixed with the urban, lonely jazz I would just feel so funny, like an ache and a yearn and a dread in my heart, until we would get down to the Cass Corridor which at the the time was still alive and teeming, albeit with mostly the weird, the motley and the dangerous swarms of predators and parasites. Now it’s pretty much picked clean and it seems like only the very last descendants of the most diehard scarabs are left searching for sustenance and crouched in the doorways.

And always I keep wondering what that weird feeling is, and why and where it comes from. Today I think it’s about an extraordinary death. The people, they come and go and live and die, but they live under social goals, dreams and visions that shape the centuries around them.
I’m starting to think, that the slow death of Detroit for the last 40 years, has sent it’s ghost tentacling out ahead of it, reaching down 94 and 696 and 275 year by year and that it’s the hungry ghost of those dying dreams that’s always nuzzling at the nape of my neck begging for “just that little corner, just a little taste” of still living flesh.